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in the dirt since history began

THE UNITED STATES?is a racist institution built on white supremacy. To be involved in governing it at the highest levels is to carry out racist policies. Trump was open about it, while Clinton only?had the decency to pretend this isn’t so. I point this out not to exonerate Trump voters, but to prosecute Clinton voters as well: you don’t deserve a cookie.

Racism and bigotry have been the charge against Trump and company on three fronts:1. The wall and undocumented immigrants.

Say what you will about the idea of a wall, but a wall in itself isn’t inherently racist or violent. Obama has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president, (to the silence of any Democratic opposition.) Will Trump even be equal to that task? On what basis does the Democratic Party claim to be less racist towards Latinx Americans? Obama never said they were all rapists and murderers, he jt separated families, detained and deported people as if they were violent criminals.

2. Mlims and refugees.

Obama jt spent eight years administrating a Kill List, droning and bombing Mlim countries, contributing to the refugee crisis, (to the silence of any Democratic opposition.) Will Trump’s foreign policy be any worse than Clinton’s would have been? On what basis does the Democratic Party claim to be less bigoted towards Mlims? Granted: Trump has said terrible things about Mlim Americans, immigrants, and refugees, which may in fact be engendering an ugly climate of more open hostility towards Mlims domestically. Terrible?as this is, it seems more a case of previoly present negative sentiments boiling over, than a significant policy difference at the executive level.

3. Trump’s unwillingness to distance himself from the support of white power groups.

This is jt gross. Certainly cae for worry. And again, white nationalists seem to have been emboldened by Trump’s victory. Nonetheless, Obama allowed the militarization of police forces, (to the silence of any Democratic opposition,) and was ineffectual against the tide of police killings. And anything Clinton might have said on this subject has to be cynically filtered through the record?of her own racially charged past statements about bringing “superpredators” “to heel.” So, on what basis does the Democratic Party claim to be less racist towards black Americans?

The problem with the Democratic party is that it lacks principles. Where did the anti-war Democrats, and the ones concerned about privacy, due process, presidential overreach, and government transparency go during the eight?years of?Obama’s administration as he cemented the overreach?of his predecessor? What is it you folks want your party to represent?

Look, I am a single issue non-voter. I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Jt trying to shed some light on why people who think like me opted out of the vote. I’ve said it again, and again: Democrats are not entitled to third party and abstaining votes. I’d rather stand with these people, thanks.

There are reasons the electoral reality map looks like?the image at the top of this post.

THE PARADE of ‘alt-media’ commentators who talked themselves blue in the face about the fix being in, in harmony with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric about the election being rigged in Clinton’s favor, were more wrong than even the establishment media, now with egg on their face for having assumed a Clinton victory was a foregone conclion based on an aggregate of (questionable?) opinion polls which showed something more like a dead heat than a clear Clinton advantage. Clinton indeed won the (meaningless) popular vote, so mainline media prognosticators have that to fall back on, I suppose. But for the alleged conspiracy to ring true, you’d have to believe the Democrats rigged the (again, meaningless) popular vote and forgot to consider the all important Electoral College, jt as, you could imagine, the analysis of (again, questionable?) opinion polling might do.

I see this all as reaction to Democrat’s one-dimensional electoral strategy: getting out the vote. Being Democrats, they roll the dice on democracy. This strategy invites dubio charges of “voter fraud,” as if millions of Democrat operatives stuff ballot boxes by voting two times, ing dead people and pet names. While establishment media was clearly in the bag for Clinton, the Democratic party is simply bad at rigging elections. ‘Getting out the vote,’ jt isn’t how elections are gamed. You know who is good at rigging dead-heat elections like this one? The Republicans. This election was rigged in favor of Republicans. And even if Trump didn’t enjoy the wholehearted support of the Republican Party, he benefited from their electoral strategy. Without getting too deeply into it, (but, c’mon, who’s better at gerrymandering?) the Republican strategy is three-pronged: 1. suppress the Democrat vote, 2. manipulate the system in every way possible, and 3. cheat.

The most interesting thing Beran notes is that there’s a big statistical difference between counties in Wisconsin that e paper ballots, and counties that relied only on electronic voting machines. “In paper ballot counties Obama won in 2012, the ballot county losses are 1-2%,” Beran says. “However in counties Obama won in 2012 that are purely digital, [Clinton] lost by 10-15%.”

It’s that last point that Beran makes the crux of his argument: as you can see from this map, some counties in Wisconsin e jt paper ballots, while others e a mix of paper ballots and direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that have voter-verifiable paper ballots. Becae there was such a big discrepancy between the paper ballot counties and the digital ones, it’s possible the latter were interfered with. [Gothamist]

And the ridiculo bit:

Indeed, for hacking to take place, the Rsians would have to have orchestrated a more The Americans-esque plot.

“People would be needed in the U.S.—at voting machine companies, in election offices, or, perhaps in polling places. Having Rsian sleeper agents in the U.S. involved in this activity would require a much bigger investment and more long-term planning than hacking voter registration databases over the internet,” Dill said. As he points out, there’s no evidence that this is the case. (And Appel, the aforementioned Princeton professor who hacked into a voting machine, also told Gothamist he’s “skeptical” that Rsians hacked the machines.) [Gothamist]

While a The Americans-esque Rsian plot does seem implaible, you know who does have people in the U.S.—at voting machine companies, in election offices, and polling places? The Republicans.

But here’s the rub: The Republicans can only seem to pull this off in close, dead-heat elections, plying these methods in swing-states strategically to capture Electoral votes. It would seem it doesn’t work when voter turnout is high, (ie: when the Democratic Party’s less imaginative ‘get out the vote’ brute force strategy works.) Why didn’t it work this time? When they were up against Donald Trump of all people? In the words of Freddie DeBoer:

The story of this election is incredibly simple. It’s not complicated at all. An election is a popularity contest. The Democrats nominated someone who is perhaps the least popular politician in the history of American Politics. Her consistent negatives and unfavorability ratings are literally unprecedented in the history of our national politics. And that’s who the Democrats chose to nominate in an election with a uniquely dangero opponent. [DeBoer]

Democrats of a certain age, and jt to be clear I was once one of you before I burned my voter registration card, will remember a little thing called the 2000 Florida recount, and also a little court case called Bh vs. Gore in which the Supreme Court settled a presidential election becae Florida, due of its confing ballots, and antiquated voting methods, couldn’t seem to count the votes fine enough to accurately determine the result of a statistical dead heat.

You may remember four years after the Bh vs. Gore nonsense another presidential election marked by reports of hours long lines at the polls in poor neighborhoods, and some funny biness to do with the results in Ohio, and the Democratic candidate John Kerry vowing not to concede the election until all votes were counted, but moments later, before all the votes had been counted Kerry gave up the fight when he realized he would lose whether Ohio accurately counted all of its votes or not.

You may have even read the extensive work of investigative journalist Greg Palast on the subject of elections in the .

Even setting aside the gaming of the vote through gerrymandering, unequal allocation of voting machines, arcane voter registration requirements, the distribution of misinformation with regard to polling places and dates, voter intimidation, skewing of exit poll data, media influence… Even excluding all of this, if you remember 2000 and 2004, you have to at the very least admit WE CAN’T EVEN ACCURATELY COUNT VOTES in this country.

So to say Trump’s skepticism of the process shows ‘a lack of respect for democracy and everything America is built upon,’ is extremely disingenuo. The system is clearly and unquestionably dysfunctional, anti-democratic, and open to manipulation, (ie: rigging.) If you truly and deeply cared about democracy, and not jt getting Gore, or later Kerry, or now Clinton the victory, you might see the opportunity for a win-win here: You get a Trump loss, and through his challenge of the result you might have an opportunity to investigate the process and put an anti-democratic system on trial.

Unless of course you want your president’s-of-choice legitimacy to be based on the same footing as was, say, a George W. Bh’s.

WILL MAINE governor Paul LePage step down after his most recent controverscial statements? No one’s really saying. But the possibility is the talk of the town since he left a controversial possibly calculated dog-whistle to his base voice mail on state Representative Representative Drew Gattine’s machine.

As far as I can tell, here’s how we came to this point.

At a town hall meeting in North Berwick on Augt 24 LePage said:

“Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state, now ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state … I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-pl percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Conn., the Bronx and Brooklyn.” [LePage]

To judge the strict factual accuracy of LePage’s statement, we’d need contents of the three-ring binder in order to crunch the numbers on the arrests between, “ever since I said that comment,” (January 6, 2016,) and Augt 24th. Furthermore, we’d want to confirm the veracity and accuracy of the three-ring binder: does it in fact contain information on “every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state” in that time period? And we’d want to spend a little time in LePage’s head: is he quoting a hard number, 90%, or is he relating the impression he had after flipping through the binder of mug shots? To be fair, Americans do apparently often overestimate the proportion of blacks and hispanics in the population.

But you can’t jt let the Governor of the state off on a technicality. The image LePage is putting out there by talking about ‘D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty knocking up white Maine girls,’ and now the unfounded ’90-pl percent’ figure, is that non-whites from away are the main villains responsible for the drug problem in Maine. He’s even gone as far as to say, “I tell ya, everybody in Maine, we have constitutional carry … Load up and get rid of the drug dealers. Becae, folks, they’re killing our kids.” [source] So he’s playing a dangero game here, painting a picture of what a drug dealer looks like– putting a profile out there –and then calling on vigilantes to commit murder.

So of course LePage is taking heat. He became enraged when he heard that a State Rep had called him a racist. The Representative, Drew Gattine, claims to have never called LePage a racist, but that he instead said, “that the kind of racially charged comments the governor made are not at all helpful in solving what the real problem is…” [source.] But whatever Gattine actually said, LePage’s reaction led him to leave this voicemail in response:

“Prove I’m a racist,” LePage challenges.

Well ok.

First, as discsed above, LePage is promoting an image of black and Hispanic drug dealers plaguing Maine and corrupting our young white women. One of the oldest, racistist tropes in the book.

Second, LePage has not provided the data to back up the image he’s promoting, namely his 90-pl percent figure. What’s more, the data that is available, does’t bear LePage’s depiction out:

Data like what purportedly are in LePage’s binder are hard to come by: Spokespeople for the Maine court system and the Maine Department of Public Safety said the agencies don’t keep records of the races of people charged with drug crimes.

But 301 — or 70 percent — of the 430 state prison inmates convicted of any type of drug trafficking self-report as white, according to data provided Friday by the Maine Department of Corrections. Another 98 — or 23 percent — self-report as black.

That total is disproportionate in Maine, which is 95 percent white. Figuring out why blacks are overrepresented, however, is tricky.

On one hand, police have said that out-of-state gangs are a piece of the drug trade here. But on the other, a 2015 study from the Mkie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine found racial bias in Maine’s juvenile jtice system.

Either way, LePage’s thesis is wrong, reducing a complicated public health and crime problem to a caricature. [Bangor Daily News]

LePage is either lying intentionally to paint blacks and Hispanics as the bad guys, or he’s willfully ignorant of the actual figures and potential racial biases at work in the state’s criminal jtice system. What type of person would be th untruthful, or so blind?

Then again, maybe LePage has access to data that the courts, the Department of Public Safety, and police agencies don’t even track. Maybe he’s telling the truth. If so, maybe he should produce the data and prove he’s not a racist.

There is an underlying issue here. ing the Department of Corrections Prisoner Search service, at the time of this writing, we find of 9155 total adult prisoners and probationers in the Maine Department of Corrections system, 8089 (or 88%) have a race/ethnicity of white. Though not as pronounced as the 70% white among those incarcerated for drug trafficking, the overall numbers are still out of whack when compared to cens data which shows the state population to be 95% white. The Bangor Daily News article quoted above mentions a Mkie School of Public Service study that a found racial bias in Maine’s juvenile system. When the dt from all of this political grandstanding settles, will the likes of LePage and Gattine allow the adult jtice system go unexamined?

IT’S SAID, in clichés, every day, that it’s best to avoid conversations about religion or politics in polite company. But I’m a shy introvert, so to be honest, I steer away from most conversations. And as a cynical malcontent, in the interest of politeness, it’s probably for the best. But if a guy can’t open up on his long defunct blog to expound on the topic of religion for a thoand-pl words, then where can a guy?

I’m not cocksure enough to call myself atheist, nor so timid as to call myself agnostic, nor pretentio enough to reject labels altogether. I consider myself a deist (with qualifiers.) “Deist” to distance myself from the trollish ‘new atheists,’ and “(with qualifiers),” to say that I replace the notion of “God,” with “Truth.” That is, the likely unknowable true nature of the world/universe/reality. I say the creative forces of the universe (if any) have abandoned humankind to our own devices. And I’d add that if there truly is an intelligent, all-knowing, all-powerful creator watching over , then they are an asshole. Like the possibly apocryphal graffiti, said to have been scratched on the wall of a Holocat death camp says, “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.”

In any case, I hold to the possibly apocryphal advice, often attributed to Marc Aureli:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are jt, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjt, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.

This seems to be the main thrt of the church: To teach people how to live good, virtuo lives, and to get right with God, or the gods, before death. The problem I run into with religion is that the dogma reads to me like some of the more kooky conspiracy theories: with an over-reliance on circular reasoning and confirmation bias. And yes, I’ve listened to and read a lot of Catholic apologetics, as well as watched a lot of (literal) Flat Earther YouTube videos over the last [embarrassingly long period of time.] These are hobbies of mine, and are entertaining for the same reasons. Circular reasoning: tremendo fun but irreconcilable.

Religion for its part, at every sticking point, circles back round to faith. My malfunction is that I don’t consider faith as a virtue. Appeals to faith serve as a boundary demarcating the limits of acceptable thought. It’s a kind of restraint that compels me to rail against it. (Again: cynical malcontent, with a serio anti-authoritarian streak.)

Still, I strive to be open to other ideas, so let’s not write it off without further examination…

Faith

I’ve heard it said that faith, hope, and charity are the three pillars of Christianity, so I would like to make sure I’m giving faith a fair shake here.

The virtual identification of faith with believing a set of statements is … a serio impoverishment of the word “faith.” The word has several rich meanings… To see faith as “belief” not only obscures the other meanings, but also distorts the notion of faith itself. Seeing the heart of Christianity requires recovering the rich meanings of faith, a recovery that leads to a relational understanding of faith and to an understanding of Christianity as a “way”—as the way of the heart. [Marc Borg [via: AZ Spot [via: FB [via: A Book I Have Not Read]]]]

Indeed, “belief” is an issue for me, I prefer the more open territory of “opinion.” And “faith” isn’t mere belief. Faith is unquestioned belief. Not having the man’s book at my disposal, I’m left to ponder what the other several rich meanings are. The word “relational” seems important. I’d hazard we’re talking about things like trt, loyalty, and sincerity as aspects of faith. Maybe some sense of openness? (Openness with respect to the relational faith of the individual to God and/or the church.)

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call faith a weakness. Indeed, it seems indisputable that power can be drawn from it. It’s jt not for me. There’s a place for things like trt, loyalty, fidelity, allegiance, etc. But why should these things be accepted on faith, to never be reexamined? There is power in changing one’s mind! (Mine is a serio anti authoritarian streak.)

Hope

The first order of living a good life is … living! To keep going! Perseverance!

One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere. [William the Silent]

Again, I don’t consider hope to be particularly virtuo. It’s harmless, but unnecessary. The absurdist in me only ‘hopes,’ in perseverance, for a few laughs along the way.

Love

Well, Charity…

This is where religion gets it right. The third pillar was charity, which to me is an expression of love. Love is the big one. Love is the linchpin of a good and virtuo life. Not jt romantic love, but love in all of it’s forms, especially “agape”:

The fourth love, and perhaps the most radical, was agape or selfless love. This was a love that you extended to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. Agape was later translated into Latin as caritas, which is the origin of our word “charity.”

C.S. Lewis referred to it as “gift love,” the highest form of Christian love. But it also appears in other religio traditions, such as the idea of mettā or “universal loving kindness” in Theravāda Buddhism. [Roman Krznaric]

Romantic love and familial love are easy. Selfless love is a virtue. Kindness, respect, empathy, nurturing, equality, charity, sincerity, forgiveness! Common human decency. Treating others as fellow human beings with stories and feelings, rather than objectifying them as economic resource units, or sex toys, or disabilities, or freaks, or sinners, or illegal alien detrit, or parasites, or criminals, or ordnance.

Polyamory, when it comes to romantic relationships, tends to get a bad rap. First of all, try treating polyamorists as equal human beings. Show them some of that selfless love. Secondly, what I propose is a revolutionary kind of polyamory: Love everybody. Practice loving in all of its forms, and embrace selfless love as a virtue.

If there is a universal statement here that in my opinion reflects an ethical Truth worth championing, it’s in the words of my late, great, Great Aunt Brenda: “Love one another.”

JTICE SYSTEM’S got me down lately. You most likely have heard of the case of Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown. The two African American men released from death row 31 years after they were wrongly convicted on the basis of coerced confessions.

Rather than paste the whole Rsell thing here again, let’s jt select the juiciest nuggets and place them alongside Democracy Now!’scoverage of the McCollum and Brown case. And I suppose we should do so as a list, since that’s where web content has gone since we retired from ‘long form’ blogging.

The institutions of law enforcement and jtice are by their very nature corrupt:

RSELL: In every democracy, individuals and organizations which are intended to have only certain well defined executive functions are likely, if unchecked, to acquire a very undesirable independent power. This is especially true of the police.

PROF. STEVE DRIZIN, via Democracy Now!: [The simple presence of] the death penalty can corrupt the search for truth. Clearly, police officers coerced and threatened these spects with the death penalty at the beginning. The prosecutor wore his death penalty convictions like notches on his belt in this case. And even the death penalty lawyers, two of the best death penalty lawyers I know of, they felt compelled to pressure Henry to confess to an expert, becae they figured that they were going to—that Henry was going to get convicted after his case had been reversed, and that they needed him to confess in order to save his life. So the mere presence of the death penalty corrupted the search for truth at every single process of this case.

Police and prosecutors are incentivized to convict the innocent:

RSELL: …a policeman is promoted for action leading to the conviction of a criminal … in consequence, it is to the interest of individual officers [to do whatever it takes to elicit a confession (or build their case).] … For the taming of the power of the police, one essential is that a confession shall never, in any circumstances, be accepted as evidence.

DRIZIN: …once they foced on McCollum, they brought him in and they grilled him relentlessly for hours. And they threatened him with the death penalty, and they promised him that he would go home. And they prepared a detailed written statement for him to sign. And at that point in time, as he says, “I would have pretty much signed anything in order to go home.”

The most able instruments of state power are exclively brought to bear against the acced:

RSELL: The whole of the resources of the State are set in motion to seek out possible witnesses against you, and the ablest lawyers are employed by the State to create prejudice against you in the minds of the jury. You, meanwhile, mt spend your private fortune collecting evidence of your innocence, with no public organization to help you. If you plead poverty, you will be allotted Counsel, but probably not so able a man as the public prosecutor.

ATTY. VERNETTA ALSTON, via Democracy Now!: …law enforcement had requested that a fingerprint … found at the crime scene next to sticks with the victim’s blood on it … be compared to Roscoe Artis, whose DNA was found at the scene and who committed a very similar rape [and murder] three weeks later. … that request was made three days before Henry’s trial and was never carried out. And based on what we know now, that request was never divulged to Henry’s trial attorneys by the state. … [T]hese cases, in 1984, were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, who was a notorio, notorio supporter of the death penalty and who secured between 40 and 50 death sentences during his tenure as district attorney. … what we’ve seen as a pattern in those cases is that he was incredibly reckless, to the point where all but two of his convictions, his death sentences, had been overturned. And the only two that haven’t are folks who have been executed. … that should signal a huge problem with all of his cases, in terms of what he’s turned over, what he hasn’t, in his own rh to judgment, in his own priorities in getting a conviction rather than seeking the truth.

The resources the state does allow for defense are insufficient:

RSELL: If law-abiding citizens are to be protected against unjt persecution by the police, there mt be two police forces … one designed, as at present, to prove guilt, the other to prove innocence; and in addition to the public prosecutor there mt be a public defender, of equal legal eminence.

ALSTON: The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission … function[s] independent of … any prosecutorial agencies or any defense organizations. They’re an independent agency that looks into claims of innocence to find, you know, evidence that hasn’t been uncovered and to verify claims of innocence. They got involved in 2010, following a letter from Leon Brown in 2009 asking them to look into his case. So, from 2010 up until basically Tuesday, they’ve had an active investigation going on in Leon Brown’s case, with the understanding that the evidence related to Leon’s case is identical to that for Henry McCollum. So that’s how they got involved. And they’ve conducted … an exhative investigation and have tested and retested many of the items of physical evidence that were found. They’ve conducted interviews. They’ve done a phenomenal job in this case.*

Police and prosecutors aren’t meaningfully held accountable for wrongful convictions:

RSELL: The defending police force should, moreover, become the prosecuting police force where one class of crimes is concerned, namely crimes committed by the prosecuting police in the execution of their “duty.”

[cricket chirping]

BON #6: It has everything to do with race:
More and more it appears that the police are here to “hold the line” between the social and economic classes, disadvantaging the lower classes who lack a “private fortune” to mount a competent defense for themselves. In a nation where class lines have been drawn and enforced along racial lines, established largely through pervasive institutional racism, means these mechanisms of power and jtice come to bear on people of color in a spectacularly brutal and unjt fashion.

* I said “insufficient,” but I’ll allow that 31 years late is slightly better than never, amirite?

Whose pink capitalism, (a trt of laissez faire economics mixed with misgivings about every single aspect of the economy requiring petroleum, and the lack of a market metric for human dignity,) became economic disestablishmentarianism.

And somewhere along the line your host started a midlife crisis, became obsessed with time, realized that time to do the things one wants, (to spend with one’s loved ones, to be creative,) is priceless, for everyone, and came to realize that valuing peoples time unequally when you askforce them to work, is evil.

Really, the recent Grid Not Goalseries of posts pretty well sums up current political views.

So, here we are at the end. The site will remain, but Stump Lane will no longer be updated. The Tumblr site will continue, though under a brand new different URL, at Odorifero Zephyrs. (Yes it’s a fart joke.) Montag — the internet handle, not the meatspace person typing these words — is dead. Still not ready for complete non-anonymity, a new moniker is born for commenting, and potential future blogging purposes, though hopefully in a more creative vein.

"We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power."